1. Field of Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate, in general, to networking and more specifically, the embodiments of the present invention relate to methods and systems for reducing the cache warm-up time to facilitate suppression of the transmission of redundant data over networks.
2. Description of the Background Art
In a typical network environment, different network devices are connected through network systems. These network devices transmit and receive data over the network systems. Some of the data is repetitively transmitted across the network systems. Repetitive transmission of the same data is redundant and reduces the available bandwidth across the network systems. This, in turn, slows down network traffic across the network systems and increases latency in data transmission.
According to conventional methods, proprietary schemes are used to suppress the transmission of redundant data across the network systems. Central to these schemes is the use of optimizing devices. The optimizing devices share data caches that store frequently transmitted data. The frequently transmitted data is stored as redundant data along with identifiers identifying them. The optimizing devices prevent transmission of the redundant data across the network system by transmitting identifiers instead of the actual redundant data. Transmission of the identifiers saves considerable bandwidth for transmitting other data, since the size of the identifiers is smaller than that of the redundant data. However, when a new optimizing device is added to the existing network systems, it is not aware which data is redundant data. Therefore, at an initial stage, instead of transmitting the identifiers, the new optimizing device transmits the actual redundant data. A data cache of the new optimizing device requires a considerable amount of time to recognize data as redundant data, in order to transmit the identifiers. The time required by the data cache of the new optimizing device to recognize the redundant data is known as the cache warm-up time. The more time the cache takes to warm up, the longer it takes to suppress the transmission of redundant data.